Rapid Fire, August 3, 2012: Chinese Planes and Ships

Given the high number of Chinese military aircraft that have not been produced several years after first exhibiting models, Richard Fisher, Jr. from the International Assessment and Strategy Center thinks [PDF] the vaporware label is often – though not always – justified.

Then there’s the discrepancy between how you model the threat, and what the threat actually is. Bill Sweetman at AviationWeek as a good post about the colorful experience of USAF pilots who flew Russian fighters in the 80s:

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“In 1987 we had the AIM-9P, which was designed to reject flares, and when we used US flares against it would ignore them and go straight for the target. We had the Soviet flares – they were dirty, and none of them looked the same – and the AIM-9P said ‘I love that flare’.”

US Senator Lindsey Graham [R-SC] proposed an amendment to the Senate FY13 Defense Appropriations bill that aimed to overrule the Department of Labor’s recently-stated policy on the inapplicability of the WARN Act in advance of sequestration. However the amendment was rejected 17-13.

The Project On Government Oversight nonprofit is overreaching in its criticism of prime contractors and committing the same sort of inflated rhetoric with their own set of casually-used scary big numbers. While it is true that primes have significant backlogs, the numbers used by

POGO are not fully funded. Typically only 60% to 70% of the total backlog is funded at any given point in time, because of indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contracts, options, cancellation clauses and other contractual mechanisms that introduce a degree of uncertainty in expected vs. actual deliveries. If sequestration happens these backlogs are not going to be fully realized. These 30+% unfunded backlogs amounts to tens of billions of dollars across the industry. Not every future dollar in your typical defense/aerospace backlog is of the same quality – in military as well as civilian aerospace.

The GAO looks back at the Army’s cancellation of the Autonomous Navigation System, a component of the US Army’s ill-fated Future Combat System. Objects in the backlog are smaller than they appear…

Air Force Maj. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general to head the Joint Strike Fighter program, where he has been deputy for the last few months. He previously led the KC-46 program after several acquisition jobs. He will replace Vice Admiral David Venlet.

DSTL, the research branch within Britain’s MoD, is looking for early-stage ideas and prototypes to counter hidden IEDs.